All My Truth 
Richard Poirier
- A Small Boy and Others: Memoirs by Henry James
Published in 1913, when Henry James was 70, A Small Boy and Others is the first of three late volumes that taken together have sometimes been called the ‘autobiography’ of Henry James. The focus of A Small Boy is on the years of his infancy and boyhood up to the age of 15, and it was soon followed by the publication in 1914 of Notes of a Son and Brother, which takes him to the age of 27. That book ends with an elegiac, idealising evocation of his cousin Minny Temple, who died in 1870 from tuberculosis. Her death ‘marks the end of our youth’, though James hoped she would live on in his portraits of Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and Millie Theale in The Wings of the Dove (1902). The third (uncompleted) volume, The Middle Years, published in 1917, a year after James’s own death, brings his life to early maturity in 1878, when he was 35.
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Richard Poirier, founding editor of Raritan, is chairman of the board of the Library of America.
Other articles by this contributor:
In the Hyacinth Garden · ‘But oh – Vivienne!’
In Praise of Mess · Walt Whitman
How far shall I take this character? · The Corruption of Literary Biography
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